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May 4, 2020 at 1:43 PMMay 4, 2020 at 1:43 PM

Daniel Romanchuk sees quarantine training as just another obstacle in his life.

The 21-year-old Paralympian was born with spina bifida, a birth defect in which there is incomplete closing of the backbone around the spinal cord. His disability has never stopped him from competing, though. Romanchuk started playing sports at age 2, and as his mother, Kim, puts it, her son “always just wanted to go fast.”

Fast is a relative term for Romanchuk, who became the youngest winner of the Boston Marathon’s wheelchair race in 2019 — with a blistering time of 1:21:36 — and the youngest winner of the New York City Marathon, as well as the first American to win the event. He’s also twice won the Chicago Marathon (in 2018 and ‘19) and last year’s London Marathon before qualifying for Tokyo Paralympic Games last fall.

But the major marathons that Romanchuk was poised to defend his title in have been postponed to the fall and the Paralympics were moved to next summer due to the coronavirus pandemic. The virus has evaporated a once jam-packed race schedule and constrained Romanchuk’s training while in quarantine at his family’s home in Mount Airy, Maryland.

“I’m sort of used to improvising throughout my life,” Romanchuk told USA TODAY Sports by phone. “Really, in my daily life, being in a wheelchair, I have to adapt to things on a daily basis for something like air travel or things not being (accommodating).

“One thing I’ve learned in racing is you can make a plan as detailed as you want, but that plan very well may change. It’s knowing what you need to do to achieve your goal but knowing it could fall apart to where you’re forced to adapt.”

Adapting might be ingrained in Romanchuk’s DNA, but the emotional strife of canceled events, postponed races and limited training ability has taken a toll on the wheelchair racing community. That’s part of why Romanchuk and his mother thought to organize a Virtual Roller Marathon on Patriot’s Day — at the exact same 9 a.m. start time when the Boston Marathon would’ve been happening.

Kim Romanchuk organized the Zoom event that featured more than 60 racers representing 13 different countries including 23-time major marathon champion Tatyana McFadden, four-time Paralympian Aaron Pike, 2016 Paralympian Kelsey LeFevour, three-time Boston Marathon champion Marcel Hug of Switzerland and Ernst Van Dyk of South Africa, a 10-time Boston champion. The virtual race was promoted on social media and open to not just marathon qualifiers, but everyone, including youth racers.

“It all came together quickly,” Kim Romanchuk said. “We were flying by the seat of our pants in a lot of ways.”

The event featured all of the racers on stationary roller equipment at home, with competitors pushing through the course at race speeds. There was no winner, and all racers competed together for the set time duration of 1:18:04 — which just so happens to be the world-record time in the race set by one of Romanchuk’s rivals, Hug, at the 2017 Boston Marathon.

Romanchuk, the defending champion in the Boston Marathon, was emotional describing the meaning of commemorating the prestigious race with the virtual marathon.

“You don’t realize how much something can mean to you until you don’t have it,” Romanchuk said, voice cracking with emotion.

What the racers did have was each other, however. The connection and camaraderie that Romanchuk had developed with fellow elite racers over years of competition was felt from all over the world — just virtually.

“When we had the national anthem playing before we began the zoom marathon, I started crying,” Kim Romanchuk explained, “because there are parts of Daniel’s routine, race to race, that you don’t really think about. You keep moving and aren’t aware of the emotions attached to them. That moment allowed me to reflect and feel how much I missed it for him. When you roll with the punches, it’s easy to not feel it that much. During the anthem, it just hit me. That race (the Boston Marathon) means so much to our family and so many others.”

Romanchuk has been training at the University of Illinois with coach Adam Bleakney since he was 16. Romanchuk’s development has been facilitated by his core training group and the university’s facilities and rollers — wheelchair versions of treadmills – which are adapted to simulate hill training.

Bleakney said Romanchuk’s natural body type — he has extremely long arms to form a 6-foot-11 wingspan — gives him a “distinguishing factor” in his success to allow him to be “highly efficient and powerful.”

“You combine that with his natural athletic ability, dedication, diligence and work ethic — adding all those variables — it’s helped him blossom very fast to be the best,” Bleakney said. “He’s constantly trying to achieve more a little bit every day and there are plenty of elite athletes on his heels so he knows that if he backs off, he could easily be overtaken. That same drive was there when he was 16, 17-years old.”

The drive has always been there, his mother said.

“Growing up, he’d compete in every sport he could,” she recalled. “Then we started to focus on track and road races. He wanted to qualify for the Rio Paralympics (in wheelchair track events). After Rio, things really started coming together, and it was a culmination of him getting older and all the work he had put in getting rewarded. I know how hard he’s worked and the attitude he goes about this. We’d see him staying with the lead pack for portions of (earlier) marathons. Then he was at the front of the pack.”

Romanchuk credits his mother and father, Stephan, for teaching him he could do something before someone tried to tell him he couldn’t.

“That mindset started growing up,” he said. “If my coaches tell me to get from Point A to Point B, failure never felt like an option, regardless of what it took. Now, as a racer, I plan out years in advance. But I mentally focus on things one day at a time, determining how I can get better on that set day.”

Kim Romanchuk said what looks like barriers to others become more like mirages to her son, and that includes the challenges set in place for wheelchair racers by COVID-19.

“He doesn’t see not being able to walk as a barrier,” she said. “This is what he knows and how he’s framed his reality. Sometimes, looking at it from the outside, you don’t realize that he’s really looking at it like, ‘Here’s where I am and here’s where I want to go. How do I get there?’ He always finds a way.”